Play that Funky Music White Boy

Aside from covering my balding pate, I am enjoying hats.  When we were in Portugal some years back my partner found a newsboy cap at Pull & Bear and I've worn it ever since.  I wear it backward, in a jaunty fashion.  Years before that he found me a very nice grey felt trilby on Queen Street with a conservative wide black band that I wear on very cold days (please, please, no feather in the band).  I've heard it said that most of the heat of one's body escapes from the very top of our heads.  All the better to cap it off during a Canadian winter.

Now that I am older I am finding it much easier to pull off a look.  I never really thought, and still don't think, that hats are a young man's purview.  My widely flanged horseshoe moustache helps.  Young men usually have very thick, luxuriant hair.  Show it off.  Like Kennedy at his inaugural, take off the top hat. Go hatless.

I am a student of memory.  My memory beguiles me, or I suppose, in the words of Clarence from Richard III, it environs me.  But unlike Clarence's spirits, my memory is not a foul fiend.  Tempered by time and distance, it troops back as innocuous presences, a pale second cousin to my waking life.  It knows its place, my memory does.  Nonetheless, in the waking world my mind is flooded with vivid recollections.  And as I lay in the warm cocoon of my bed, I recall what had transpired in my head as I woke.

Glenn, Glenn.  He was smirking at me.  "You're a little faggot then?  You're a fag aren't you?"  I was in the schoolyard, and being on a lower social rung I kept my mouth shut.  He was a dark, curly-haired French-Canadian, and had stubble on his chin.  Smoking brazenly in middle school, at what - 14?  Smelling bad, or at least his gym clothes did, in that smelly corner of his.

It was the change room.  I remember now.  The fluorescent lamp that lit that reeking space was dying.  It flickered in snaps of light, spasmodically.  I was in the air held fast by a dozen hands as I heard the sharp sound of the shower slipping on.

I am a tender-hearted soul; I know it.  I've always known it.  That hasn't helped.  I had a sweet girlfriend, her name was Vicky. Long straight hair. Smaller than me.  That last comment means she was good to dance with.  And we had a song, from Captain Fantastic.  We would turn slowly on the gym floor, me looking up at the unlit lamps.  It was a Sock Hop, which seemed terribly dated to me then, but so many things were about the 50s in the 70s.

My mother had known about the dance.  She bought me a pair of platform shoes, the kind you would see at Woolworths or Kmart.  Knock offs of knock offs of something Gene Simmons would wear.  Some sort of leatherette or vinyl, I think.  Instead I wore a pair of socks she had gotten me, appropriate I thought.  And oddly then, with seeming prescience, I remember they were rainbow-coloured.  Each toe had its own knitted space, like the shoes Cornelius wore in Planet of the Apes.

I was in the hallway of the school on some Friday or Saturday.  I recall the darkened lockers, which seemed odd to me, only knowing them during the brightness of day time.  It was the winter, early evening.  The doors to the gym were open, and inside a dark space echoed with Top 40.

"Those socks are so faggoty, you're some kind of queer aren't you?"  He succeeded in shaming me to the point where second-guesses had settled in.  I stood there, ignominiously.  The socks became things on my feet that were screaming to everyone that I was different.  Maybe the shoes would have been a better choice?  No, it didn't matter.  It could have been anything he'd picked out for scrutiny.  I danced in them with as much abandon as I could muster.  What a ball buster he was, what a stick-in-the-mud.

There was a shack out in a field beside the school.  All the cool kids gathered there to smoke.  In those days it was the swagger with a lit smoke that counted, not the latest iPhone.  I never smoked.  In the spring, when it warmed up I found myself alone with Glenn after the bell had gone.  The yard was desolate, and he was trying to convince me to go with him to that shack and have a cigarette.  He had no one to go with.  What was it in his voice that sounded almost like pleading that set me on edge?

Whether he was ready to punch me out, or pull my pants down and fuck my little ass, I'll never know.  I do recall a vague sense of menace, one that made me hightail it into the relative safety of the classroom.

It is a proper Canadian winter this year.  And as I type, the snow is falling again.  This is the second storm in as many weeks.  I have been wearing my wool jodhpurs.  No reader I do not ride, but I used to.  I wear a navy pea coat with a striped scarf.  In the house, to chase the chill from my toes I wear a thick pair of wool socks, the colour of dirt.

We should beg pardon for this digression, if it had not been part of our understood agreement with the reader to be as desultory as we please, and as befits Companions.

Leigh Hunt

The Walk in the Wood